


to take a human hand

by strikinglight



Series: as trees let go their leaves [2]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Nohr | Conquest Route, Slow Burn, Wartime Romance, Weddings, crazy flashbacking all over the place, implied slow burn i guess because [waves hands at big blank timeframe]
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 03:40:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7250506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This, they know, is how you start a story. This is how you build a home. A man goes to his knees before his joy and tells her he would give her all his days if she’ll have them, and the promise itself points the way toward a new world, one where a girl has only to say yes and the very sky opens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to take a human hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hachimitsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hachimitsu/gifts).



One night by the cooking fire, shortly before they’re due to take the evening’s first watch, Silas asks him, “What do you need me to do for you tomorrow?” 

At first Kaze doesn’t quite understand, looks at him with a wrinkled brow, clueless about how to answer. He notices, too, the ripple that runs around the firepit. Laslow coughs. Niles snorts. Odin makes a sound suspiciously like the beginnings of a giggle. All in the space of the heartbeat. But Silas ignores them all and presses on in earnest.

“In Hoshido, I mean. How does it go, when you’re a groomsman?”

It’s the last thing he’d been expecting. And to be honest, searching through his memories turns up only hearsay. He’s never served as a groomsman before, has never imagined finding himself on either side of that arrangement with anyone but his brother—meaning possibly never, unless Saizo ever managed to find a girl with enough steel in her spine and the patience of a saint.

Except now he and Saizo have faded out of each other’s lives and here is Silas offering to take his place, essentially asking how to do right by him as a friend.

“Not much, if I recall. You could help me dress.” He does his best to make it sound light, like a matter of no great importance. _Not_ like he can barely believe all this is even happening. “Or we could bathe together. Wash each other’s backs, and so on.”

Another snort from Niles. Silas, parroting, “You need me to wash your back.”

“I would wash yours in return, mind.” He’d figured this wasn’t common practice in Nohr. “As I said, you don’t have to. You could just stand beside me, and it would be enough.”

“No,” Silas tells him. Then, more firmly, “No, let’s do it. We’re doing it.”

The commitment is touching, to say the least—all the more so for being unexpected, and he can’t quite suppress a smirk of his own when he thinks of it the morning after, remembering the obvious discomfort that had accompanied it. Because it had been made in good faith, here they are, waist-deep in the river that runs by their camp, clothes in a pile on the bank. Unarmed and unarmored, in honor of the day.

They submerge, come back up, wade awhile without speaking. Strangely enough, Kaze can make sense of this awkward, quiet unceremoniousness. Had it been Saizo here with him and not Silas, per the dictates of tradition, and the two of them in the bathhouse at home (it stings a little to say the word) and not out here in the wilderness, he can’t imagine it would have been much different.

(The thought of Saizo doesn’t usually bring him pain, not now that they both are where they feel they belong. Resignation makes it easy to be without him. Still, today is different, and Kaze cannot escape the twinge he feels when he realizes his brother won’t know why.)

“You have a scar,” Silas says.

Kaze almost asks which one. His chest and back are cross-hatched with scars from knife and whip and arrow, so numerous he’s forgotten the stories behind most of them. He knows only that he’s been collecting them since he first picked up a blade of his own. Before the war ends he expects to accumulate a few more. Anyone who lives a fighter’s life—Silas himself, to start with—looks much the same.

But then he lifts an arm and feels the slightest of pulls at his shoulder, the healed tissue over one old wound just a little bit stiffer than the others, and he knows which one.

 

* * *

 

They meet on the road home from Mount Sagesse, on the back of the wagon where the wounded ride. As the march begins she climbs in and begins immediately to work, bandaging limbs and tightening tourniquets, tending to what minor cuts and scrapes she can feasibly treat on the move. The youngest princess rides alongside—he thinks he might remember her, the little girl with golden hair and a staff in her hand. 

Then Azura sits beside him, and he can think of nothing but the time that has passed since he last heard her voice.

“You have an arrow in your shoulder, Suzukaze.”

So he does. Briefly he considers apologizing for that, and for many other senseless things besides—for appearing before her in such a sorry state, for dirtying her hands. A wave of pain passes over him and he finds he can only speak the truth.

“It is good to see you, milady.” That is to say, how good it feels to hear her say his name again.

There is steel in her eyes and blood across her palms—his blood and the blood of others—but he thinks he sees her smile a little. Maybe it’s to keep him awake. “I am glad to see you too.”

In due course the march halts and the men come to help unload the injured. One of the knights who reins his horse in by the wagon lifts Kaze from where he sits and bears him bodily into the infirmary. The man is solicitous as a brother, careful not to bump or jostle, surprisingly gentle as he lays him down in an empty bed. (Later, Kaze thinks, he will ask his name and the name of the youngest princess, who had smiled at him and on the road and whispered a numbing charm for his shoulder.)

When the knight straightens up and steps away, she is there again. Her fingertips press down now, probing the area around the wound. “Does it hurt?”

“No, milady.” There’s a twinge around the edges of the spelled flesh, the beginnings of a burn, but the answer slips out of him by reflex. She touches an especially tender spot and he doesn’t so much as wince.

All the same she sees. She tilts her head, skeptical. “Tell me true.”

“Only a little,” he admits. Even that feels like a defeat. This Azura is so much quicker than the one in his memories, so much more difficult to get around. “That charm was well-made, but it’s wearing thin.”

The look she gives him is just a little reproachful, as if she wants to tell him off for attempting to play the hero. Still, he is a task she needs to see through to the end, so she calls out to the youngest princess across the beds. “Elise, dear, if you could—”

“Of course.” The girl rises and comes at once with her staff in one hand and an ewer of water in the other, all warm and cheery where Azura is staid, imperturbable in her focus. Kaze thinks it’s fitting that they share the work of healing between them. “I’ve got you, big sister.”

The magic is a few short words and soft yellow light. After she finishes he finds sensation has receded again; Azura touches him a second time and he feels nothing, not even the smooth unbroken coolness of her skin.

“Thank you, Elise. Better, Kaze?”

Meekly, “Yes, milady.”

She bends down toward him then and everything is so clear, so clear to Kaze in that moment—her hair falling like silk ribbons all around them both, the arrow’s black fletching stark against the white of her arm as she pushes the wound open with the flat of a scalpel, grasps it by the shaft and eases it up and out. Her eyes, too. On the road coming back here he had looked into those eyes and seen steel, seen strength and spirit and resolution that were so at odds with what he remembered, but he had not understood. But now, up close, he does. She’s chosen this for herself, chosen to be where she is. And he sees so many unasked questions there—where he’s been, what _his_ choice will be—that it takes all of his strength not to look away.

This is not the time or place for storytelling, so she keeps her silence. Instead she concentrates on treating his injury. Shallower, she remarks, than she had first thought, either because he’s faster than he used to be or someone called Niles had actually obeyed the general directive not to shoot to kill—likely some lucky mix of both. When the wound is satisfactorily clear she sews it back up with needle and thread. And she slaps his wrist, calmly, when he tries to help her with the bandages.

She allows herself one question as she ties the last knot. “What will you do when you are well?”

He doesn’t need to tell her that he’s chosen as she has, that his life and his death are Corrin’s now. No doubt she’s surmised as much. Neither does he tell her _I will stay with you,_ though that feels wrong not to say. She deserves to know that she hasn’t ceased to matter—she remains, somehow, counted among his reasons, his promises. But his head is heavy and he can’t get his tongue around the words. This day and everything in it—the battle, the pledge, the wound, her eyes—have barely felt real, closer to something out of a dream.

“I will remain here.”

Her hand comes down again, flat on his chest this time, forcing him to relax against the mattress, and he knows this is no dream. The pulse of his heart is too true under her palm. He can only pray she doesn’t feel it.

“Sleep now,” she says.

 

* * *

 

 At sunup on the day, they come for her. 

Camilla is as swift and punishing as any field commander, her sisters close on her heels carrying between them a veritable arsenal of brushes and combs and hairpins and mirror. The mirror is at least as tall as Elise, Corrin all but invisible behind it as she leans it against the central pole of Azura’s tent, Azura herself seated speechless and unmoving on the edge of her bed. From then on her morning is a blur of hands, lengths of cloth, orders loosed like arrows. Enter Corrin with her dress, exit Corrin with her bedrobe. Enter Elise with fresh water and rose oil, exit Elise with an empty basket, sent out for flowers.

She thinks she should help with _something,_ at least. Should at least dress herself, or fix her own hair. Camilla has other ideas.

“Hands where I can see them, Azura.” Her voice is honey-sweet, but there’s a serrated edge to it that would be fatal to ignore. Azura’s hands stay folded in her lap. “Don’t you lift a finger, now. Corrin, darling, start brushing, if you please.”

Azura’s hair is near-impossible to handle, the sheer length of it alone already enough to terrify, but Corrin sets to work readily, gathering the lengths into her lap. There’s been an unusual glow about Corrin all morning, Azura muses as she watches the two of them framed in the mirror. A well of sunlight somewhere inside, nearly bubbling over. How strange to even think it might be because of her.

“It’s all right, just let her fuss over you.” Corrin stands at her shoulder and gives her a smile—gentle, knowing, impossible not to return. “Just give her this one day.”

After the brushing, Camilla takes Corrin’s place while the latter stands aside and stretches her arms, deft fingers weaving and plaiting from crown to tips. There’s no excuse not to make this a proper wedding, she insists as she works, even on the march like this. They’ll make a bride of her yet, even if they have to do without so many things. The veil, the gown, to say nothing of a roof over their heads and a proper banquet. They have next to nothing, really, as they are now.

Azura watches Camilla’s handiwork where it falls over her shoulder, tries to follow the intricate crossover of strand over strand with her eyes. She wants to say this is not nothing, that without them she doubts she’d know her left hand from her right, but if there’s anything she knows about Camilla at all it’s that gratitude would probably overwhelm her. No one Azura’s ever met has lived so wholly to give affection, her need to actively care for something bordering on an obsession. On the other side of her ruthlessness Camilla is a worrywart, a mother hen, eternally preoccupied with making sure their larders are always stocked, their camp always clean, her little sisters no less than radiant on the days they’re to be wed.

She can give her this day, Azura decides, bending her head obediently to her ministrations. Just the one day. It won’t come again.

Before noon Elise returns, triumphant and sun-flushed, her basket spilling over with baby’s breath and lily-of-the-valley. This time it’s she and Corrin who step in to pin them, taking the pins from Camilla’s hands, carefully silent on how violently they’ve started shaking, on the mist that’s crept in over the stars in her eyes. They know it’s not nothing, of course. They all know, even as Camilla retreats behind Azura’s dressing screen to splash her face with water.

 

* * *

 

Off the battlefield, she always finds him among the living. Most days that means tending to the horses in their pens, or the pigeons in the dovecote. It’s quiet, plodding, thankless work—or so it appears, though she’s never mucked out a stable before—but Azura thinks he doesn’t ever smile as much as when he’s with the animals, feeding them, calling them each by name. 

“You treat them tenderly.” There’s a bird in his hand and another on his shoulder; she stands at a distance, hesitant to intrude. This should be impossible, this delicacy in the way he handles things. The days before and behind them are all red with war and it’s easy to forget.

“The better to teach them where home is.” He turns to her, motioning her closer. “They’d make poor messengers if they didn’t know where to return.”

She remembers him teaching her about birds, in the pigeon lofts in Hoshido. That their bones are hollow, and that’s what lifts them into the air. That when the seasons change they follow the warm wind south and wait out the winter there. That there is one place they can be taught to return, again and again over great distances, no matter where in the world they are taken. She remembers these things and she is sixteen again and he seventeen, and there is a bird at rest in her palm, and he holds her wrist gently to steady it. The down is everywhere—settling in her hair, clinging to his sleeves.

There are still instances like this, when the memories arrest her so fiercely it’s near-impossible to turn away. She knows he feels it too, this persistent pricking at the heart over the most seemingly insignificant reminders, though they never talk about it in so many words. Most days they buckle down and fight through it on their own, because they have to. Because it’s the only thing they can do. Because it’s who they are now, and that means practicing how to hold things loosely, how not to grasp at the world around them. Learning you can’t decide beforehand what you can and cannot bear to lose. She knows. Most days it’s enough.

On days that it isn’t, they seek each other out.

“I would ask something of you, Kaze.”

Somewhere there’s an old woman lighting incense sticks for a girl who cannot come back to her. Because the girl has no wings, there is no return. There is only everything she has learned in the days since her departure, pressed and dried between the pages of old books, folded up with clean paper. Thyme for cough. Verbena for headaches. Chamomile for a good night’s rest.

He is the only one who can deliver it all, the boy who’s been taught betweenness from birth, who comes and goes as inconspicuously as a shadow. He is all she has left. Sometimes that thought is terrifying, that another human being could be both so unnoticed and so necessary, so much like the wind he was named for. Other times, it is all the comfort she’ll allow herself—that he is here, and there is no one else who will let her send him to all the places she cannot go, no one else to whom she can speak of all the things she should not speak.  Always he smiles at her in all her fracturedness and says _yes_ and sits beside her, ready to tell her everything he still believes for them both. They are walking toward something. A greater peace is possible, a world brighter even than the one they let go.

She wonders, from time to time, if she asks too much.

“Anything,” he says, his eyes steady on hers, and she hears wings.

 

* * *

 

They had asked that Corrin pick the place, and for them she had chosen a stretch of open field just a short walk out of camp, to give them their fill of sky. When Kaze arrives with Silas by midafternoon his eyes seem to fill with only color, green and blue and the gold of the sun in abundance unfurling all around them like a tapestry. Makeshift altar table set with white cloth and the implements of the ceremony—candles, chalice, jug of wine, heavy leather-bound book of ceremonies. 

And on the ground, wildflowers. Wildflowers in every color he can think to name—dozens, hundreds. What could well be every wildflower for miles around, plucked and scattered across the grass to make an aisle. Everyone in attendance ranged row on row on either side, dressed in their best clothes, each face bright with anticipation.

In other words, everything in its place, everything just as she had ordered it prepared for them. Corrin stands now with Xander in the middle of it all, the two of them deeply engrossed in a conversation Kaze can’t quite hear. Running through the ceremony, most likely. Practicing the words until they’re perfect. But when they glimpse him approaching they look up as one and smile at him, and his heart leaps up into his throat.

“My liege,” he says, going to one knee in the grass at Corrin’s feet. And to Xander, head bowed in reverence, “My king.”

In answer their hands settle on his shoulders, guiding him back to his feet so that one after the other they can greet him by name and embrace him. Xander’s face is grave, his manner brisk and solemn as they meet each other. Meanwhile Corrin holds him by the wrists and looks fiercely into his eyes for a heartbeat or two, before her arms clamp so tightly around his neck he can hardly breathe.

She knows so little about how strong she is, even now, struggle though he does to articulate it to her. To thank her. To say anything. In the end all he manages is “It is wonderful, milady”—all she’s made, all she’s done—and she doesn’t so much answer as make a tremulous little noise against his shoulder and hold on tighter.

 

* * *

 

More work waits for them at the end of every battle won. In this as in all things he looks to Corrin for direction, walking back into camp at her side. 

“Is there anything you need, milady?”

“Go…” Exhaustion overtakes her and Corrin lets the word trail. Her shoulders sag; a line of sweat runs down the side of her cheek. “Go to Azura in the infirmary.” She says it almost pleadingly, and at times like this it’s always disarming to remember how young she is, how fragile under the armor. 

Many times he’s heard Corrin speak like this, soft and shaky over the syllables of Azura’s name. He’s seen Corrin look at her and turn her head away, pained. Whenever this happens he knows that in her mind she’s doing an accounting, taking herself to task for homes lost and bonds severed, every little precious thing Azura’s torn herself from to stand by her side. He knows she thinks herself responsible.

“Stay with her and Elise,” Corrin tells him. “Help them, please.”

Corrin looks at Azura whenever she feels weak and thinks that she’s failed her, but Kaze knows that’s not all there is. Beneath the ache he knows there is fire there too, a fierce desire to protect what little she feels she _can_ give. A family, such as it is, albeit one they’re building haphazardly together. Something made to endure and be a home.

He has never spoken to anyone of this. It isn’t his place. He only inclines his head down, tells her, “I will go.” In a whisper she thanks him, and he goes.

Elise is always there, Elise of the sunny smiles and the spells of healing, and she is always first to greet him when he comes in. He allows her to take him by the sleeve and lead him to where he is needed, applies himself most studiously to the tasks she sets—roll bandages, grind herbs for a poultice. All the while he listens to her chatter as attentively as if he’s at a war council, nodding and “hmm”-ing in all the right places. It’s the least he can do; Elise deserves service in return for all the hope she has to keep believing in for all of them, and for the smiles she always seems to win so easily from Azura, hidden though they may be behind a hand or the lengths of her hair, only ever glimpsed by accident as she goes about her own tasks.

They don’t speak much, here. She doesn’t often ask for his help; it seems enough that he is close by. For his part, he is content to observe her as she treats the wounded—to note the purposeful way she moves among them and speaks to them, taking stock of their needs and their pains with grave, focused attention. To see her so engaged always disorients him a little; he knows how trying it must be for her, how exhausting to be so present with so many people she can probably barely hear herself think. But because they are not a large force, she’s taught herself how to do things they need—how to suture a gash and set a bone and burn a wound closed—and when he watches her at her work he always thinks she is more now, so much more than she was.

(He had known as much when upon their reunion she had cut an arrow out of him without even blinking. There’s nothing amusing about the memory, but he smiles to recall it all the same.)

Even here Azura’s movements are like a dance, every task accomplished with precise, careful grace. Never forceful, never panicked, never senseless. Impossible not to trust, even knowing who she is. He sees it in the way the men respond, the disquiet in their eyes giving way steadily, receding as they begin to heal. After some days under her stern and assiduous care even the most hardened of them will accept the needle, the scalpel, will drink anything out of the cups she puts in their hands, however noxious it might appear. And with Elise there to soften the blows, to tell them stories and make them laugh and remind them of all they have to get well for, strength soon returns. They come alive.

The ones they cannot help, Azura sits with until they are gone.

There are not so many of those, not lately. In many ways the men have bloomed under their leadership—are stronger, more determined, cleverer in the way they bring both their minds and their bodies to fight. But some days there are still a few and Azura sends Elise out for water so she doesn’t have to be the one to do it, to kneel on the ground beside each bed and hold their hands and ease them, as gently and carefully as if they were only children, into the black sleep.

She sends Elise, but she lets him stay, and he stands watch over her like a sentinel where she kneels. One time—only once, by the bedside of a boy who had taken a fever on the march—he had knelt at her side, shed the leather of his gloves and reached out to hold her hand. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget how cold her skin had been, how her fingers had slipped between his so readily he could barely believe it. He had come close to her, then.

But mostly he does not. He only stands by her, never touching, as she goes into herself. Protecting her, waiting for her to come back.

 

* * *

 

It’s Leo who comes to get her after everyone else has left and she waits alone in the tent, unmoored and adrift, one hand pressed hard against her stomach to still the panicked fluttering she feels there. He lifts the tent flap and enters with a hasty “Beg pardon,” and even before she sees him she fully expects the brisk manner, the dour expression he wears when something tries his patience. Like the victim of a short straw after lots have been cast over some unpleasant, paltry task or other. 

What she finds, instead, is grace itself. Pressed collar, armor polished to a high shine, boots pulled with painstaking care onto the right feet. And yet for all his pulled-together appearance there is something fundamentally relaxed about his bearing, quiet and gentle and at ease. This is a new Leo, one she’s met only once or twice, each opened-up, unguarded moment rarer than a gem.

She sees the disorientation mirrored in his own face when he looks up at her, examines the flowers in her braided hair.

“You are very beautiful.” It’s an admission that unsettles them both. All told, they barely recognize each other.“You always are, I suppose, but today you should hear it said.”

He looks surprised by his own candor—and young. So strangely young, for all his wisdom. Before she even realizes it she reaches out and lays her fingertips against his cheek, tenderly.

“Now, how am I supposed to answer that?” 

She’s expecting him to stiffen, to protest the touch. Instead he reaches up and covers her hand with his own, and Azura’s certain that she feels something fall away—the weight of too many intervening years, the terrifying blank space between _now_ and _before._ She remembers him remarking when they were first introduced that in his childhood he’d thought her a myth, her name the sort of word spoken only furtively in whispers, if at all. What he’d imagined was little more than a ghost.

Now they are here, face to face, and it feels delicate, like being caught without armor. Here is the young man she barely knows, the boy she never saw, holding her hand on what could well be the most important day of her life. Steadying her, bringing her to anchor beside him, to remind her she need not face this alone _._

“You don’t need to answer. Just take it.”

There’s a rosy, embarrassed sort of bloom in his cheeks that she can see him trying (and failing) to will away, and she stifles the urge to laugh, to tell him _I know, I know, all this is strange to me too._ But he doesn’t need it; he rallies on his own, straightens up under their joined hands, tugs her forward as gently as he knows how. She is almost proud.

“Come,” Leo tells her. “He’s waiting for you.”

 

* * *

 

The biggest tent on-site is many things at once according to need—command center, assembly room, banquet hall. Today, as she finds it often is under Xander’s orders, it is all of these.

The abundance of food at these regular strategy meetings had struck her as odd at first, because she could hardly imagine that anyone could talk tactics with any sort of coherence while eating (or, for that matter, she had thought wryly, muster up any drive to eat while talking tactics). Now, after some careful observation, she recognizes it as a calculated move, deliberate as everything Xander does is deliberate. He always feeds his people before he puts them to work—and feeds them _well,_ eternally on the lookout for what runs out the fastest, what people come back for second and even third helpings of, fine-tuning his instructions accordingly for the squadron of cooks at his command. In turn, Xander’s generals give him their full attention, all the more ready to speak and listen once their appetites have been appeased. And, of course, attendance is always perfect.

It’s an admirable strategy, one that works on her far more often than she cares to admit. Indeed it’s half the reason she comes to these meetings at all. The other half is that a seat has been prepared explicitly for her, however adamantly she’s tried to refuse it, to insist she isn’t needed there. Xander’s place is at the head of the long table, with Corrin at his right hand. The place on his left, the second place of honor, is hers. He says it’s where she belongs—and Azura knows this too is deliberate, is his way of interposing himself bodily between her and anyone who would think to do her harm. The others too are placed just so, Leo to her other side, then Elise, then Camilla across the table next to Corrin. All together, they make a fortress.

She thinks, sometimes, that being with Xander amuses her almost as much as it makes her feel like weeping, a possibility that would likely have given him a heart attack had it ever actually come to pass. There are too many things about him that are so cuttingly familiar—the grave expression, the warrior’s stance, the arresting dignity of his body language. Xander makes her wistful, twists her heart with longing for something now so distant she doesn’t even see the point of naming it. At the end of the day she knows all five of them do that, each in their own way, but she sees things most clearly with him—exactly what she’s given up to come here, the exact reasons why.

_You remind me of someone I loved._

The pain surprises her, the quick, lancing, naked edge of it. She presses her hands together in her lap to still their trembling, feeling the chill that’s washed all of a sudden over her skin. Thankfully, Xander’s attention is elsewhere now, wholly occupied with supply routes, his head bent over a map and away. On any given day he has too many things to think about without having to count her among them, too many much more important arguments he needs to conserve his energy for, over and above the ones they’ll inevitably have about her. (She’s fine. She’s not fine. She looks sad. She looks pale. He’s made her do too much again and the only recourse is to send her straight to bed. All told she’s never argued with anyone more in her life.)

Leo shifts beside her, gives her an odd look. Camilla too, but before either of them can speak, before she can think of something bland and placating to say, something moves at the very edge of her line of sight. When she glances up from the table, there’s a glass of water in her hand and a fresh roll on her plate—generously buttered, still warm. She turns her head, and Kaze is there. The smile that she remembers is there.

“I’ll be right here in case you want another.”

She relaxes, but only slightly. The matter of Kaze, at least, is an argument she only ever has with herself.

When she thinks about it— _really_ thinks about it, as reasonably as she can manage—she knows he is not here for her, or because of her. It had been Corrin who won him to her side in the end—Corrin and the peace that was promised, like a star in darkness. In that they are the same, but the fact remains that she was the one who went ahead and numbered him among the many things she’d been ready to leave behind. This is something her mind never quite lets her forget, something it pricks her with whenever she finds herself needing him too much.

She always tells herself that he would have done the same in her place. Had he been there first, she wants to believe he would not have looked back, because they both know how little they matter, she and he and their small lives and all the small things they love.

And yet, now that he _is_ here, she looks for him. They are many years and a handful of countries away from their old lives, but in some ways it’s like they haven’t moved at all—against all that is reasonable, against all that makes sense, he’s remained by _her_ side. When the conversation during these meetings outruns her, when the noise presses in and makes her feel alone, her eyes always know where he is, and her reasons for seeking him out are no more lofty than that his presence helps her breathe.

 

* * *

 

Kaze stands facing the altar. To calm himself, he listens to the sounds of the ceremony pulling itself together—Elise tuning her violin in one corner, distant snatches of birdsong, stray threads of conversation—and with only half his mind at work in the here and now, he talks to Silas. 

“Do you have the—”

“Yes, of course.” For emphasis Silas pats the chest pocket of his tunic. He doesn’t point out that this must be the tenth or eleventh time Kaze has asked. “All safe here with me.”

“All right.” It’s half an apology, half a “thank you”—never mind that he’s probably uttered both of those things far more than ten or eleven times in the last few hours.

The gratitude feels like too small a thing. The truth is that, over the course of this day alone, he’s probably accrued a debt to Silas that he can never repay—at least not until the day comes that they find their positions reversed. Then and only then, after having seen each other through the realization of their dearest dreams, will it truly make sense to say they stand on equal ground.

(The real truth is that even contemplating that possibility, Kaze finds he still feels beholden. Without Silas, he might still be dreaming. He might have given up the dream, even.)

It’s when the talk all around them dies—dwindling to a low hum, then a few whispers, then nothing at all—that he realizes he’s been listening for her all day. He almost thinks he hears the approach now, heavier steps leading lighter ones that fall near-soundless against the ground, and he knows that should be impossible, even for him.

“Turn around.” Silas is not looking at him now but at some distant point over his shoulder. His eyes are wet, his words wobbly and stuttering. “Or don’t, if you want to live. Though I don’t imagine we can start this wedding if you don’t face forward.”

Kaze feels his own throat close. He already sees too many things that he can barely believe are real. The altar. The flowers. The men who stand with him. “Are you _crying?”_

“I am not!” The denial comes too loudly, earning him a sharp look from Xander—but Xander himself is frozen at the head of the aisle, and his eyes snap forward again almost immediately, as though spellbound. “I’m not. It’s just all these flowers, you know. Pollen in my eyes.” Silas clutching now at Kaze’s arm, looking for all the world like he’s about to spin him around himself. “Gods, Kaze, _look at her.”_

Over his shoulder he hears Elise playing, soft and slow as daybreak. Under the music, the peculiar silence of an army that has laid down all its swords and stands now at attention, holding its breath.

Kaze breathes. Then he turns, and with that one movement Silas and Xander and the book of ceremonies and Silas’ tears are all behind him.

And she is there.

 

* * *

 

When he looks back on it, he finds he can’t remember anything about these particular beginnings, can’t put a finger on anything exact about where or when or how the change comes. He only knows that it’s happened. He’s forgotten himself. He’s let himself go.

One day a girl from town pushes a few apples on him, smothering his flustered protestations with excuses of her own—her father will not miss them, this year’s harvest is rich, even a soldier on the march should eat as well as he can. He carries them back to camp, face burning, and makes a beeline for the infirmary, where he finds Elise washing up and happy to receive two of his bounty. It’s only afterward that he lets himself offer the other two to Azura, exiting the tent hastily and apologetically on some pretext as soon as she takes them from his hands.

One day he comes to her tent with a letter she’s been waiting for, and stands decorously on the other side of the flap until she comes to receive it. She lingers for a few moments at the entrance, saying nothing, a strange look in her eyes he’s never seen before—but it’s only when she asks him out loud if he’ll keep her company while she reads it that he allows himself to follow her inside.

One day he ties a few sprigs of wild heather to the shaft of her lance while her back is turned. The next day they swing from the front post of her tent instead, bright white and purple petals stark against the canvas like a beacon. These are not the first flowers he has given her. He does not know just yet what makes them different, or if this—all of this—counts as courtship, and if in her silence she is allowing herself (however circuitously) to be courted. He does not know enough to say for certain what any of this means.

(At times like this he finds himself almost missing Saizo’s presence. Not that he would have had anything to offer by way of advice or sympathy, but Kaze does remember how as a boy he had tailed Kagero through the marketplaces to find out what her favorite foods were, had taken her by the hand one day with something approaching tenderness. And at the time Kaze had told himself that if someone as bristly and thick-headed as his brother could understand what this all was, this matter of hands and hearts, then there must be hope for him somewhere. But that had been a lifetime ago, of course. Before coming here, before her.)

He takes his evening meals with Silas on the far side of camp, hoping for a kind of reprieve. It’s not long before he finds there is no escape even here.

“You and Lady Azura.” Silas is looking away from him, into the depths of his soup bowl, vacillating over the syllables of her name. He recognizes, perhaps, how delicate the subject is. In spite of that, he persists. “You’re old friends, are you not?”

There’s something he isn’t saying that Kaze hears anyway, and here the conversation splits in half. Silas has his own reasons for inquiring about old friendships, about what has been and what possibly could be, if one is brave enough. If nothing else he might simply be asking if Kaze suffers as he does sometimes; Kaze himself isn’t blind to the wistful looks, the long walks Silas takes at night when he can’t sleep for fear of dreams, the way his speech snags around the utterance of one particular name.

These days Kaze always thinks of Azura and finds himself at a loss for words—precious little to say about what they were, nearly nothing about what they are. What they might be, now.

“Before,” he says, hesitating to name the place and time, tiptoeing gingerly around words that always threaten to wound him a little, “I was responsible for her, I suppose.”

It had been easy, _before,_ to pass her off as a responsibility. Even if he has always known that was never all she was.

 

* * *

 

“I won’t make it,” she says, faintly, and right away she knows it’s the most ridiculous thing she’s said in her life.

“Of course you will.” At her side there’s a soft snort; of course Leo knows it too. “This is nothing, Azura.”

Leo’s arm is solid under her hand and his voice is sure in her ear but as she hears Elise’s violin start to sing her eyes fix on Kaze and will not move from where he stands. They do what they’ve known how to do for years on years on years—seek him out past a hundred other faces and shapes and shadows, find him and hold him there.

One step and her knees buckle just a little. Leo’s fingers tighten over hers, closing her grip more securely around the inside of his arm.

“On my cue.” She realizes just then that this must be the first time she’s heard him laugh. “Left. Right. Left.”

Kaze waits for her. She sees him smiling and all the noise in her head dissipates, and all she knows after that is peace.

Two steps. Three steps. Four steps across the carpet of flowers, carrying her closer.

 

* * *

 

“I will see you home,” he says.

He had accompanied her into town that afternoon on some pretext, to buy supplies it would have been just as easy to send out for—sewing needles, spools of thread, bandages, salve. The day had slowed and they had found themselves meandering, tracing a winding path in the dust with their steps, taking the longest possible course. When sense returns it’s well into evening, and the flickering orange stars of the torches being lit in the distance are the only thing to tell them where the campsite is.

 _Home_ , she knows, is provisional, impermanent. The kind of place you inhabit knowing you will lose it. It cannot be more for someone who’s been a guest all her life in someone else’s house. She’s always taken care to emphasize this to herself, never allowed herself to take anything for granted, but she always finds everything she understands makes significantly less sense when he enters the picture. This is a knack he’s always had—he comes, and there is something unnameable about his presence that turns her aside and undoes all her hard work.

As they walk she toys with the idea that it’s her own fault for not being strong enough. Suddenly home is not rooted in the earth, is not Hoshido, is not Nohr, is not even just a tent in the wilderness that she knows how to disassemble and pack up to carry away with her at a moment’s notice. Instead it lives and moves and follows her, walks beside her as closely as she will allow. She has no choice but to conclude—with no small measure of dismay—that she’s forgotten herself, let herself settle into things and grow too comfortable with the idea of a _together_ that endures.

She figures it’s her own fault when they pause at the entrance to her tent for just a little too long. He stands too close and she berates herself for letting him, but when she sees in his face that he’s caught somewhere between kissing her and not, all sense evaporates.

“Azura—” he says, and she can count on her fingers the number of times he’s called her by her name, but the rest of what he had meant to say is lost when she leans in and puts her lips to his instead. One of her hands still holds the tent flap, clenching the canvas so tightly her knuckles go white.

His face, too, is white when she pulls back, his eyes glistening. All around them the torches flicker, making shadows.

“Azura,” he says again. She almost covers his mouth and tells him to stop, because if she gets used to the sound of him saying her name she knows she will not want to hear anything else. “I have loved you…” He stops, shaking his head as if to clear it. With one hand he reaches up to cradle her face, ghosting a thumb along her cheekbone, trailing warmth over her skin. “So long,” he finishes, on a second breath.

It sounds like an apology. In another life she imagines this would have played out differently. Maybe they would have been braver, would have thought about things less—would have kissed perhaps a thousand times before now. She recognizes the opportunities for what they were, remembers the hesitation, the lingering at the threshold. But Azura looks back now over the road they’ve walked, sometimes together, sometimes apart, and things make sense to her. She can see the pieces falling together, every chance missed leading them here, to the life in which they need each other most, perhaps.

She studies his expression and knows exactly what she’ll find there—the disbelief, the struggle, like he wants more than anything to do right by her. Not to ruin this. The fact that he even thinks he _could_ is so silly it makes her laugh, because he has always done right by her. He has always been perfect.

“Will you…?” She doesn’t know, really, what she’s asking, or what comes next; she only knows that she wants to give him a choice.

This time he doesn’t hesitate. He takes her hand, and lets her draw him in.

 

* * *

 

When she reaches the end he is there to meet her, but all his bones are spellbound and he cannot move. Neither can she, she soon finds, without help. But Xander holds the book open there before them, Corrin and Silas to either side of him standing straight-backed with their hands over their hearts. And in the midst of the hush that has covered everyone like a shroud Leo moves, seamless and unperturbed—unhooking Azura’s hand from his arm and taking Kaze’s hand in his other one unceremoniously from where it hangs limp at his side. With a little sound in the back of his throat that is equal parts amusement and disdain he joins them, completing the work of it, giving her away.

Then Leo is gone to his place at the head of the gathering and they face each other, the singular point of contact between their linked hands waking them up, bringing them back to where they need to be.

“It is good—” she starts to say, in not much more than a whisper, like she’s not sure she should even breathe this thought.

“—to see you, milady,” he finishes for her, and they both know that by rights he should not call her that anymore. Maybe one day they’ll grow out of it, but today he offers it and she takes it because few things have been more precious to her all this time, because that is how things have always stood between them.

Together they turn toward where Xander stands at the altar with the sun burning and brilliant above him. He speaks the words of blessing, so practiced he barely seems to be reading from the book at all, so sure it’s as if his heart knows them. And at his direction they bow their heads and close their eyes and all the world shrinks down to only her breathing in time with his, the feeling of all that they love arrayed behind them, standing over them.

When the time is right Silas steps forward with the rings, places one perfect unbroken circle of beaten silver in the center of each open palm. This, they know, is how you start a story. This is how you build a home. A man goes to his knees before his joy and tells her he would give her all his days if she’ll have them _,_ and the promise itself points the way toward a new world, one where a girl has only to say yes and the very sky opens.

They look upon one another and, together, they say the words.

**Author's Note:**

> Wedding vows purposefully left blank because all my brain was giving me was the sequence from _Game of Thrones_. (Although really you don't get much more to-the-point and cryworthy than "I am his/hers and s/he is mine, from this day until the end of my days.")
> 
> Thank you for reading! One more to go.


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